Suchitra Mattai at Kavi Gupta
In its large hotel room, Kavi Gupta has dedicated an entire back wall, as well as some surrounding space, to a salon-style grouping of works by Suchitra Mattai, who currently has a solo show at the Chicago gallery and recently relocated from Denver to LA.
The gallery brought three works made from bunched and sewn saris to its Art Basel Miami Beach booth and wanted to present a different side of her multifaceted mixed-media practice. On view here are wall-hung pieces that toe the line between collage and assemblage, with photographs, painted elements, and affixed items like a fanny pack clip or a string of pearls.
One especially eye-catching work shows a red-and-white china plate against a floral background; the trick here is that about a third of the plate has been broken off and Mattai has recreated it in paint, a metaphor of filling in an absence with a sense of fiction.